Anticipating in Lapidus pere someone like Schlepperman—the comic Jew of Jack Benny’s radio program, with his Seventh Avenue accent and hopeless solecisms—I had discovered instead a soft-spoken patrician at ease with his wealth, whose voice was pleasantly edged with the broad vowels and lambent languor of Harvard, from which I discovered he had graduated in chemistry summa cum laude, carrying along with him the expertise to produce the victorious Worm.

William Styron -- Sophie’s Choice

The patrician face changed suddenly at the name.

Diana Gabaldon -- Outlander

Just as he said this, a tall, sharp-nosed, capable-looking woman walked into the room, the age of a young-ish grandmother, with a thin, patrician-harpy face and iron-rust hair going gray.

Donna Tartt -- The Goldfinch

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His face did not belong to modern civilization, but to ancient Rome; the face of an eternal patrician.

Ayn Rand -- The Fountainhead

Yet, in spite of this, nowhere in all America will you find more patrician-like houses; parks and gardens more opulent, than in New Bedford.

Herman Melville -- Moby Dick

’Major Cavalcanti, a worthy patrician of Lucca, a descendant of the Cavalcanti of Florence,’ " continued Monte Cristo, reading aloud, " ’possessing an income of half a million.’

Alexandre Dumas -- The Count of Monte Cristo

The patrician lines of a lemon-yellow Empire evening gown stressed her graceful body, and she stood like a person proudly in control of her proper background.

Ayn Rand -- Atlas Shrugged

The patrician and the knife-grinder, the duke and the peer, the limb of the law, the courtiers and townspeople, as they used to say in olden times, all are subjects of this fairy.

Victor Hugo -- Les Miserables

The complaint had sometimes made itself audible, even in that deaf city and dumb age, that, in the narrow streets without footways, the fierce patrician custom of hard driving endangered and maimed the mere vulgar in a barbarous manner.

Charles Dickens -- A Tale of Two Cities

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He looked up, staring across the green-lighted tent at the inbred, patrician lines of her face.

Frank Herbert -- Dune

Like her older brother, Peter, she had gray eyes and a slender, patrician elegance.

Dan Brown -- The Lost Symbol

Chapter V. Tom as a patrician.

Mark Twain -- The Prince and The Pauper

He says he felt "uncomfortable" when he went for his interviews downtown, and of course he did: he was short and ungainly and Jewish and talked with the flat, nasal tones of his native Brooklyn, and you can imagine how he would have been perceived by some silver-haired patrician in the library.

Malcolm Gladwell -- Outliers

Just before Kasischke-a tall, athletic, silver-haired man with patrician reserve-emerged from the airport customs queue, I asked Andy how many times he’d been on Everest.

Jon Krakauer -- Into Thin Air

We articled clerks, as germs of the patrician order of proctors, were treated with so much consideration, that I was almost my own master at all times.

Charles Dickens -- David Copperfield

As an educated man successful in his profession, as an eminent Republican and church leader-even though of the Methodist church-Mr. Clutter was entitled to rank among the local patricians, but just as he had never joined the Garden City Country Club, he had never sought to associate with the reigning coterie.

Truman Capote -- In Cold Blood

Zayd’s grandfather on his dad’s side (a patrician who was chairman and CEO of Commonwealth Edison Power) taught Zayd how to hunt.

Ron Suskind -- A Hope in the Unseen

She was in the high school, and had notions of life which were decidedly those of a patrician.

Theodore Dreiser -- Sister Carrie

He stared angrily back at the softly lit drawing-room of the hotel in which he imagined the sleek lives of the patricians of Ireland housed in calm.

James Joyce -- A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Sir Leicester receives the gout as a troublesome demon, but still a demon of the patrician order.

Charles Dickens -- Bleak House

And we have stolen upon Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon, too irreverently, at the instant of time when the patrician lady is to be transformed into the plebeian woman.

Nathaniel Hawthorne -- The House of the Seven Gables

With a large allowance for difference of tastes, and with all submission to the patricians of Coketown, this seemed so extraordinary a source of interest to take so much trouble about, that it perplexed him.

Charles Dickens -- Hard Times

He is handsome, with patrician features and swept-back, slightly greasy, light brown hair.

Jhumpa Lahiri -- The Namesake

"A regular Roman nose," he used to say, "with my goiter I’ve quite the countenance of an ancient Roman patrician of the decadent period."

Fyodor Dostoyevsky -- The Brothers Karamazov

His face was patrician, eager to serve an equal who needed his expertise.

Robert Ludlum -- The Bourne Identity

BIDDY THE CLAP: One immediately observes that he is of patrician lineage.

James Joyce -- Ulysses

But her memory specialized in misdemeanors and offenses, which were as ineradicable from her brain as the patrician wrinkle was between her eyes, and her dissatisfaction was an element and a part of nature.

Saul Bellow -- The Adventures of Augie March

She forgot the old ideal of the Southern gentleman,—that new-world heir of the grace and courtliness of patrician, knight, and noble; forgot his honor with his foibles, his kindliness with his carelessness, and stooped to apples of gold,—to men busier and sharper, thriftier and more unscrupulous.

W. E. B. Du Bois -- The Souls of Black Folk

In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels -- The Communist Manifesto

The Roman smiled as if complimented, and raised his patrician head a toss higher.

Lew Wallace -- Ben Hur

When nurses looked in they saw two exemplary young people, healthy and strong, dressed like patricians.

Mark Helprin -- A Soldier of the Great War

A natural gentleman finds his way in, and will keep the oldest patrician out, who has lost his intrinsic rank.

Ralph Waldo Emerson -- Selected Essays

Welty lived in the state capital, Jackson, and had an accent different from the rather patrician speech of Faulkner.

Robert MacNeil and William Crane -- Do You Speak American?

While a battle rages in the streets outside the palace, Pasquale is locked up in his patrician hothouse, holding an orgy.

Thomas Pynchon -- The Crying of Lot 49

For example, the Roman republic had two legislatures, which had different opposite interests: the patrician and the plebian.

Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, & John Jay -- The Federalist Papers — Modern English Edition 2

Edith Wayne was a patrician brunette, a serious, soft-voiced woman, sweet and kindly, despite a rather bitter experience that had left her worldly wise.

Zane Grey -- The Light of Western Stars

His eyes, sapphire orbs suffused with an inner glow, wandered over the assembled Rowan and Workshop dignitaries with an expression of patrician magnanimity.

Henry H. Neff -- The Fiend And The Forge

The Demon’s face was the same—a gleaming white mask of patrician, almost genderless beauty framed by smooth black hair that hung past his shoulders.

Henry H. Neff -- The Maelstrom

He ran a hand impatiently through his iron-gray hair, gazed down his patrician nose at me from great height, though he was no taller than I, and snorted loudly at what he saw.

Russell Baker -- Growing Up

The struggle between the patricians and plebeians of Rome must be considered in the same light: it was simply an intestine feud between the elder and younger branches of the same family.

Alexis de Toqueville -- Democracy In America, Volume 2

The former, in which the people voted by centuries, was so arranged as to give a superiority to the patrician interest; in the latter, in which numbers prevailed, the plebian interest had an entire predominancy.

Bellegarde, penniless patrician as he was, was an insatiable collector, and his walls were covered with rusty arms and ancient panels and platters, his doorways draped in faded tapestries, his floors muffled in the skins of beasts.

Henry James -- The American

What with the patrician requirements of Barnacle junior, the three young ladies, Mrs Tite Barnacle nee Stiltstalking, and himself, Mr Tite Barnacle found the intervals between quarter day and quarter day rather longer than he could have desired; a circumstance which he always attributed to the country’s parsimony.

Charles Dickens -- Little Dorrit

He was a most Christian gentleman, a member of a Reformed parish, with strict traditional opinions, so stubborn an advocate of restricting qualifications for those who govern to the aristocracy that it was as if he were living in the fourteenth century, when, against the dogged resistance of the old free patricians, tradesmen had first begun to win seats and voices in the town council—in sum, a man who opposed anything new.

Thomas Mann -- The Magic Mountain

…Toffy, George wished naturally to pursue his conquests further, and one day as he was strutting about in prodigiously dandified new clothes, near St. Pancras, and a young baker’s boy made sarcastic comments upon his appearance, the youthful patrician pulled off his dandy jacket with great spirit, and giving it in charge to the friend who accompanied him (Master Todd, of Great Coram Street, Russell Square, son of the junior partner of the house of Osborne and Co.), George tried to whop…

William Makepeace Thackeray -- Vanity Fair

Factions For Government And as Factions for Kindred, so also Factions for Government of Religion, as of Papists, Protestants, &c. or of State, as Patricians, and Plebeians of old time in Rome, and of Aristocraticalls and Democraticalls of old time in Greece, are unjust, as being contrary to the peace and safety of the people, and a taking of the Sword out of the hand of the Soveraign.

Thomas Hobbes -- Leviathan

"Patricians?" Hodge said.

John Gardner -- The Sunlight Dialogues

The patrician savored its dark blend of tobaccos from Cuba, Honduras and Sumatra.

W. William Winokur -- The Perfect Game

"Gods, Judah, how hot the sun shines!" cried the patrician, observing his perplexity.